Using technology to help communities shout louder

Summary

This contribution from an interdisciplinary team of academics offers an attempt to support communities in ‘shouting a little louder’ within policy making. It models its own aspiration in reflecting the importance of bringing together different forms of expertise: in planning, interface design, engaging communities. The contribution focuses on the development of an app, MapLocal, which aims to draw in the local knowledge of people who may not usually get involved in neighbourhood planning. The app provides a tool for mapping community assets and contributing to planning by tapping into the fine-grained understanding of a place, which comes from living there, but also providing a way of generating and harnessing community creativity and imagination. MapLocal is an example of the potential of such spatial and visualisation tools to shift the parameters, power and potentialities of policy by enhancing the engagement and interaction of communities for local problem solving.

The UK's coalition government, which came to power in 2010, took a flamethrower to the English planning system. Superficially, the Localism Act, 2011 offers a major transfer of power to communities: you can write a legally binding Neighbourhood Plan and bid to buy community assets or to run community services. The rhetoric is that this enables communities to co-produce their neighbourhoods and shape their own local planning destiny. Looking at the detail of the Act, however, co-production only seems to go so far. Communities can suggest which areas of their neighbourhood should be a priority for development and the kinds of things they would like to see built, but these suggestions have to be in compliance with local and national planning guidance. If they are not, then they cannot be included in a Neighbourhood Plan. Similarly, and perhaps more significantly, communities cannot prohibit types of development in their area. Planning that restricts tall buildings, McMansions, chain coffee shops and so on is simply not possible within the new legal framework. Economic growth is everything and planning is not permitted to act as a ‘constraint’ on this.

Neighbourhood Planning as conceived by the Localism Act, then, allows for co-production of planning so long as communities are happy to co-produce the things that policy makers want.